England Through the Ages

The music on this evening's program ranges in mood from the grandeur of what has been called the "English commemmorative-patriotic-religious genre" (Purcell and Handel selections and on a small scale the Agincourt Song) to the more intimate and fervent sacred expressions of Tallis and Byrd.

John Redford, a playwright and poet as well as a composer, was master of the choristers at St. Paul's Cathedral in London from at least as early as 1534 until his death. His Veni Redemptor is in simple three-part counterpoint, the lower voice based on a Gregorian chant. Its serenity is here juxtaposed with Tallis's moving five-voice setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, part of the scriptures for use in Holy Week. Although Tallis did not necessarily intend it, the work with its plea "Jerusalem, return to the Lord" certainly brings to mind the religious and political turmoil in sixteenth-century Britain and elsewhere.

Byrd's Five-Voice Mass is one of three by this great master of polyphony, who himself remained catholic despite the English Reformation. He wrote music for both Anglican and Roman rites. Latin settings were in use in mid-century under the catholic monarch Mary Tudor, and Queen Elizabeth favored them despite the subsequent rapid trend toward services in English. But by the end of the century, when the Byrd masses appeard, their performance and even their possession would have been illegal. They may have been intended for gatherings and worship by catholics, "underground"; perhaps for some particular great catholic household. Byrd himself seems to have been so universally admired as a composer that he may have enjoyed a sort of immunity from the pogroms of the times.

Byrd's mass music is based on no known chant or other pre-existing melody, but rather is freely composed on original motifs.

Poems to St. Cecelia and their musical settings are an English tradition. Musicologist P. H. Lang writes "Although there is only a passing reference in her legend to her praising God in music, Cecilia somehow acquired fame as a musician, and painters early appropriated her as a favorite subject, creating magnificently-anachronistic scenes in which the second-century martyr plays on beautiful Renaissance and Baroque organs." Some of the Cecilian poems are as filled with seeming non sequiturs as are the paintings, involving elements from ancient history, mythology, and so forth. It helps to view these poems' true subject as being the power of music rather than the saint herself.

Auden wrote his hymn in 1942 for Benjamin Britten with the expectation that he would set it to music. Britten has made an interesting statement of philosophy: "One of my chief aims is to try to restore to the musical setting of the English language a brilliance, freedom, and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell. ... The composer should not avoid unnatural stresses if the prosody of the poem and the emotional situation demand them, nor be afraid of a high-minded treatment of words, which may need prolongation far beyond their common speech length, or a speed of delivery that would be impossible in conversation."

Purcell's Jubilate was written in 1694 for a festival celebration of St. Cecilia's Day (November 22). His ceremonial church music owes much to the music performed at the court of Louis XIV in France, where Purcell's teacher Pelham Humphrey studied and his monarch, Charles II, was reared. (The king, "tired with the grave and solemn way which has been established by Tallis and Byrd ... ordered the composers of his Chapel to add symphonies etc. with instruments to their anthems" according to a contemporary account. Choral church services had come to an end by the 1640's under the Commonwealth; by the time they resumed the way was open for new musical influences.

The German Handel became a naturalized British subject in 1726, after his German employer, the Elector of Hanover, became King George I. He spend the remainder of his career in England. The Dettingen Te Deum was first heard in 1743 and was a popular favorite at St. Paul's Cathedral for many years.